M'Carthy, we need scarcely assure our readers, did not suffer all this time to pass without making an effort to escape. This, however, was a matter of dreadful danger, as the circumstances of the case stood. In the first place, as we have already said, the door between the room in which he lay and that in which the Whiteboys sat, was open, and the light of the candles shone so strongly into it, that it was next to an impossibility for him to cross over to the window without being seen; in the second place, the joints of the beds were so loose and rickety that, on the slightest motion of its Occupant, it creaked and shrieked so loud, that any attempt to rise off it must necessarily have discovered him. “We must do something with the body of this unlucky boy,” continued the speaker; “divil resave you, M'Carthy, it was on your account he came to this fate; blessed man, if we could only catch him!” “Here, Dick, you and Jemmy there, and Art, come and let us bring him into the bed' in the next room--it's a fitter and more properer place for him than lyin' upon chairs here. God be merciful to you, poor Lanty, it's little you expected this when you came out to-night! Take up the candles two more of you, and go before us: here--steady now; mother of heaven, how stiff and heavy he has got in so short a time--and his family! what will they say? Hell resave you, M'Carthy, I say agin! I'm but a poor man, and I wouldn't begrudge a five-pound note to get widin shot of you, wherever you are.” It would be idle to attempt anything like a description of M'Carthy's feelings, upon such an occasion as this. It is sufficient to say, that he almost gave himself up for lost, and began to believe, for the first time in his life, that there is such a thing as fate. Here had his life been already saved once to-night, but scarcely had he escaped when he is met by a person evidently disguised, but by whose language he is all but made certain that he is a man full of mystery, and who besides has expressed strong enmity against him. This person, with a case of pistols in his breast, compels him, as it were, to put himself under his protection; and he conducts him into a remote isolated shebeen-house, where, no doubt, there is a meeting of Whiteboys every night in the week. The M'Carthy spirit is, proverbially, brave and intrepid, but we are bound to say, that notwithstanding its hereditary intrepidity, our young friend would have given the wealth of Europe to have found himself at that moment one single mile away from the bed on which he lay. His best policy was now to affect sleep, and he did so with an apparent reality borrowed from desperation. “Hallo!” exclaimed those who bore the candle, on looking at the bed, “who the devil and Jack Robinson have we got here? Aisy, boys--here's some blessed clip or other fast asleep: lay down poor Lanty on the ground till we see who this. Call Molly Cassidy; here, Molly, who the dickens is this chap asleep?”